Before the Frost (30 page)

The conversation with Amy Lindberg kept coming back to her.
The Lord's will be done. But what exactly did this god want? That a pet store burn to the ground, that some helpless animals die in unimaginable terror and pain? First it was swans,
she thought.
Then the calf: singled
out, charred, dead. And now a whole store full of pets. It was clearly the work of the same man, one who had calmly regarded his work and said: The Lord's will be done.

Linda walked over to Lindman, who looked at her with surprise.

“What are you doing here?”

“I'm just a curious onlooker. But I need to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“The fire.”

He thought for a moment.

“I have to go home and eat something anyway,” he said. “You can come along.”

Stefan's apartment was located in one of three high-rises scattered arbitrarily across an area dotted with a few single-family homes and a paper-recycling center.

His was the middle building. The glass in the front door had been smashed and replaced by a piece of cardboard in which someone had also kicked a hole. Linda saw a message scribbled on the wall: LIFE IS FOR SALE. SPREAD THE WORD.

“I read that every day,” Stefan said. “Makes you think, doesn't it?”

He unlocked the apartment and handed her a hanger for her coat. They walked into the living room, which was furnished with a few simple pieces, randomly scattered around the room.

“I don't have anything to offer you except water or beer,” he said. “This is just a place for me to camp out.”

“Where are you moving? You said something about Knickarp.”

“I'm renovating a house out there. It has a large garden. I'm looking forward to it.”

“I'm still at my dad's,” Linda said. “I'm counting the days until I get out of there.”

“You have a good father.”

She was taken aback.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. You have a good father. I didn't.”

Some newspapers were lying on a side table. She pulled over a copy of the
Borås Daily
.

“I'm not nostalgic,” he said. “I subscribe to it because I enjoy reading about everything I've managed to escape.”

“It was that awful?”

“I knew I had to leave when it was clear I was going to survive the cancer.”

He fell silent. Linda wasn't sure how to change the subject. Then he stood up.

“I'll get the beer and some sandwiches.”

He came back with two glasses. Linda declined the sandwich.

She told him how she had overheard the conversation between Amy Lindberg and her friend and subsequently asked her some questions. Stefan listened attentively. She continued to talk, going back to the incident when Anna thought she saw her father in the street in Malmö. The shadowy figure of a Norwegian, who was perhaps named Torgeir Langaas, kept appearing in her account.

“Someone is killing animals,” she said in conclusion. “Someone has also killed a person, cut her up into pieces. And Anna has disappeared.”

“I understand your concern,” Stefan said. “Not only because of the vaguely disturbing possibility of a return by Anna's father. We also have the menacing presence of an unknown person, someone who says ‘The Lord's will be done'. Perhaps not aloud, but the intent is there in all his actions. You've also learned that your friend Anna is religious. These random facts are starting to look like pieces of a grotesque puzzle, not least the morbid detail of allowing two severed hands to go on pleading for mercy after death. From everything you've said and from what I already know of the case, it's clear that there's a religious dimension to all of this that we haven't taken as seriously as we perhaps should have.”

He drank the last of his beer. There was a rumble of thunder in the distance.

“It's out over Bornholm,” Linda said. “There are often thunder-storms out there.”

“It's an easterly wind. That means it's on its way here.”

“What do you think about what I just told you?”

“That it's true. And that what you've told me will impact our investigation.”

“Which investigation?”

“Birgitta Medberg. Anna's disappearance has not been a priority up to this point. I guess that will change now.”

“Am I right to be scared?”

He shook his head hesitantly.

“I don't know. I'm going to write down everything you've told me, and it wouldn't be a bad idea for you to do the same. I'll let my colleagues know about this tomorrow.”

Linda shivered.

“Dad will be furious that I went to you first and not him.”

“Why don't you blame it on the fact that he was so busy with the arson?”

“He keeps saying he's never too busy when it comes to me.”

Stefan helped her put on her coat. She thought again that she was genuinely attracted to him. His hands on her shoulders were gentle.

 

She returned to Mariagatan. Her father was waiting for her at the kitchen table, and she could tell from his face that he was angry.
You bastard,
she thought.
Couldn't you at least have waited until I got home?

She sat down across from him and braced herself.

“If you're just going to rant and rave I'm going to bed. No, I'll leave. I'll sleep in the car.”

“You could at least have talked to me. This amounts to a breach of trust, Linda. A huge breach of trust.”

“For Christ's sake—you were in the middle of a pet massacre. A street was going up in flames.”

“You shouldn't have taken it upon yourself to talk to that girl. What gave you the right to do that? How many times do I have to tell you this is not your business? You haven't even started working yet.”

Linda pulled up her sleeve, and showed him Amy Lindberg's phone number.

“Will that do? I'm going to bed.”

“I find it deeply disturbing that you don't even have enough respect for me not to go behind my back.”

Linda's eyes widened.

“Go behind your back? Who said anything about going behind your back?”

“You know what I'm saying.”

Linda swept a salt shaker and a vase of withered roses to the floor. He had gone too far. She rushed out into the hallway, grabbed her coat, and slammed the front door behind her.
I hate him,
she thought, fumbling in her pocket for the car keys.
I hate his endless nagging. I'm not spending another night in this place.

She tried to calm herself when she reached the car.
He expects me to feel guilty,
she thought.
He's waiting for me to go back and tell him that little Linda Caroline had a moment of rebellion but takes it all back now.

“Well, I'm not going back,” she said aloud. “I'll stay with Zeba.” She was about to start the car when she changed her mind. Zeba would talk, ask questions, discuss the situation. Linda didn't have the energy for that. She drove to Anna's apartment instead. Her dad could sit at the kitchen table and wait until the end of the world as far as she was concerned.

 

She put the key in the lock and pushed the door open.

Anna was standing in the hall with a smile on her face.

32

Iknew it had to be you. No one else would drop by like this, like a thief in the night. You probably intuited I had come back and woke up. Isn't that it?” Anna said cheerfully.

Linda dropped her keys.

“I don't understand. Is it really you?”

“It's me.”

“I can't tell you how relieved I am.”

Anna frowned.

“Why are you relieved?”

“I've been worried sick about you.”

Anna lifted her hands in apology.

“I'm guilty, I know. Do you want me to apologize or tell you what happened?”

“You don't have to do either right now. It's enough that you're here.”

They went into the living room. Even though Linda was struggling to come to terms with the fact that Anna was back and sitting in her usual chair, she noticed that the framed blue butterfly was still missing.

“I came over because I had a fight with my dad,” Linda said. “I thought I would sleep on your couch since you were away.”

“You can still sleep here even though I'm back.”

“He made me so mad. My dad and I are like two roosters fighting on a dung heap. The more we struggle, the more we get mired into the muck. We were arguing about you, actually.”

“About me?”

Linda stretched out her hand and brushed Anna's arm with her
fingertips. Anna was wearing a robe on which the sleeves had been cut off for some reason. Anna's skin was cold. There was no doubt that it really was Anna who had come back and not an impostor. Anna's skin was always cold. Linda could remember that from their childhood when they—with the tingling feeling of exploring forbidden territory—had played dead. The game had made Linda warm and sweaty, but Anna had been cold, so cold in fact that they stopped playing. It had scared them both.

“I was so worried about you,” Linda said. “It's not like you to disappear and not be home when we had agreed to meet.”

“You have to remember my world was turned upside-down. I thought I had seen my father. I was convinced he had come back.”

She paused and looked down at her hands.

“What happened?” Linda asked.

“I went to look for him,” she said. “I didn't forget about our plans, but I thought you would understand. I had seen my father for a second and I had to find him again. I was so worked up I was shaking and couldn't drive. I took the train down to Malmö and set out to look for him. It was an absolutely indescribable experience. I walked up and down the streets using all my senses, thinking there had to be a trace of him somewhere, a scent, a sound.

“It took me several hours to get from the station to the hotel where I had seen him. When I walked into the hotel lobby a fat lady was half-sleeping in the chair I had been sitting in. I became furious; she had taken my place! No one had the right to sit in the holy chair where I had seen my father and he had seen me. I walked up to her and shook her arm. I told her she had to move because the furniture was going to be replaced. She did as I asked, although I still don't understand how she could think I was part of the hotel staff in my raincoat and with wet hair stuck to my cheeks. I sat down in the chair when she had left. There was no one outside. But I thought if I just stayed there long enough he would return.”

Anna stopped talking and left to go to the bathroom. Thunder rumbled in the distance. She came back and continued:

“I sat in the chair until the receptionists started looking at me suspiciously. I booked a room, but tried to spend as little time as possible there. To conceal my true purpose I pretended to be reading
and taking notes. On the second day the fat lady came back. She must have been spying on me and felt that she had found me out because she said ‘You thief—you stole my seat!' She was so worked up I thought she was going to hyperventilate. I thought to myself that no one would make up a lie about sitting in a chair in hopes of catching a glimpse of a father they hadn't seen in twenty years. So I told her the truth and she believed me. She sat down in the chair next to me and said she'd be happy to keep me company while I waited. It was crazy. She talked nonstop, mainly about her husband, who was attending a conference in men's hatwear. You can laugh—I didn't, of course—but it was true. She told me all about it in excruciating detail, about the rows of somber men in airless conference rooms meeting to decide which kinds of hats to order for the new season. She talked and talked until I was ready to strangle her. But then her husband appeared. He was as fat as she was, and was wearing a broad-brimmed and probably very expensive hat. She and I had never actually introduced ourselves. As she was about to leave with her husband, she said to him, ‘This young lady is waiting for her father. She's been waiting a long time for him.' And the man asked, ‘How long?' while he tipped his elegant hat. ‘Almost twenty-five years,' she told him. And he looked at me, thoughtfully but also with great respect. And the entire hotel lobby, with its polished, sterile surfaces and strong smell of commercial-grade cleaning agents, was transformed into a church. He said, ‘One can never wait too long.' Then he put his hat back on, and I watched them leave the hotel. The whole situation was absurd, almost unbelievably so, but that's what made it so real.

“I stayed in that chair for close to two days before I realized that my father was not going to reappear. I decided to go out and look for him, though I kept the room. There was no master plan to my search. I walked through the parks, along the canals and the various harbors. My father had left me and Henrietta because he sought a freedom he couldn't have while he was with us. Therefore I looked for him in the open spaces. There were times when I thought I had found him. I would get so dizzy I'd have to lean against a wall or a tree, but it was never him. All the longing I had been bottling up for so long finally turned to rage. There I was, still looking for him, still wanting
so badly to find him, and he had simply chosen to humiliate me by showing himself to me once and then disappearing again. Naturally I started to doubt myself. How could I be sure that it had been him? Everything spoke against it. The last night I was there, I ended up in Pildamm Park. It was three o'clock in the morning and I called out into the darkness: ‘Daddy, where are you?' But no one answered. I stayed in the park until dawn, and then I suddenly felt as though I had been through the final trial in my relationship with him, as though I had been wandering in a fog of delusion, thinking he was going to show himself to me, and when at last I emerged into the light I accepted that he didn't exist. Well, maybe he does exist, maybe he's not actually dead. But for me, from that point on, he was just going to be a mirage, a dream, that I could evoke from time to time at will, nothing more. All of those years I had always believed deep down that he was out there somewhere. Now, at the very moment that I believed he had finally returned, I realized he was never coming back at all. Now that I could no longer hold on to the idea of him as a living, breathing person, to be mad at, to keep waiting for, he was finally gone for real.”